What is Star Wars CarcassoneCarcassonne is a tile laying game where players draw from a pile (or more) of tiles and build up their territories, which they can claim by placing a meeple on the specific feature. Standard (and I have not played the other variations beside standard and Star Wars) is easy going, if there are multiple players' meeples on a feature / territory each get points or if one has more meeples than the others then only the one get's points. It sounds simple (which it mostly is) and boring (which it definitely is not).

Star Wars mixes this up, by being a stand alone variation of the game, various features are replaced thematically (towns become asteroid field, monasteries become planets, and roads become trade routes), there are less meeples per player but it adds combat (to determine who gets points) and planetary invasion (again using combat mechanics), but removes fields. By and large the complexity in the two games is roughly on par, Star Wars is maybe a touch more complex because of the combat.

And what does the expansion addWhile the Star Wars theme is basically a re-skin of the game with addition of combat, the expansion adds one faction (The New Order/Kylo Ren), more tiles, as well as more complex combat mechanisms.

The new faction is straight forward, add it in, play up to six players.

More tiles - I don't have the box in front of me, by I'm pretty sure it adds 18 tiles, each with a BB-8 silhouette in case you want to pull them back out. The tiles have some configurations not found in the base set, which changes things up a little, but nothing great.

Also included, not mentioned above, is six tiles with a 50 on one side, and 100 on the other to help with scoring. Also there are stickers to put on the meeples, which feature Kylo Ren.

What about the more complex combat mechanismsFor each player there is a blaster and a light saber which can be placed with a meeple. The light saber adds +1 to a combat die result, and the blaster substitutes a different die which goes from 3 to 8 instead of standard 1 to 6. If combat ensues this can shakes things up a little.

In SummaryCarcassonne is pretty straight forward, Star Wars Carcassonne is a touch more complex, and really the expansion does not make it harder it just adds options. Hypothetically its possible to leave out the blaster / light saber though really it's not a bit change. The extra tiles are great, and six players is always good. I do have a minor concern that with six players it might not be possible to fully realize a strategy, though there is always a "luck of the draw" element, so I have some doubts this would be a big issue to most players.

If you like Star Wars Carcassonne, odds are you'll like this first expansion. Basically, it is more of the same, with minor variations to combat which can be left out, as the one thing that (superficially) adds complexity.

"Erweiterung"As the German word in the title "Erweiterung" shows, this is currently aimed at the German market, though the manual (available from https://www.schmidtspiele.de/media/files/48260_Star_Wars_Car...) is multilingual. The game components don't really have "language" on them. (Apology for the link to the manual being to a store front, I could not find it anywhere else.)

We have dragged Reason from her Throne and set in her place the Empress of Dreams [liber Endvra]

Amor, sola lex

pawnvsdice wrote:

Scarlet Witch wrote:

It's important to add that there are not enough dice in the box for 2 players... they played cheap with this expansion

Yeah, only having red and green dice is a drag but you can get different colours if you buy Chessex 16mm ones.

It's not that; the expansion comes with a special die you use when resolving blaster attacks, but in the box there's only one of such dice, so that if both players have a blaster, they cannot resolve their attack roll at the same time.

Of course, the die is just a modified D6 where X=X+2, but reading in the rules sentences like

"When 2 or more players engage in a battle, in which multiple meeples with blasters are involved (*), you have to take turns using the yellow die and remember what number you rolled"

kinda sucks. Charge 0.50 more on the retail price, and include one extra blaster die in each box.

(*) = also, wrong use of commas. This is a defyining relative clause, so, commas must not be used.